Light posting lately. One reason is that Elizabeth and I have been (and are) back in San Francisco for another business/pleasure trip.
In lieu of a real post, here are some random thoughts I've jotted down while here:
Fave thing about San Francisco #42: The number of people you pass on the street who look like characters in a movie or novel set in San Francisco.
From the Fillmore-area house that's becoming our regular SF pied-à-terre, we set out for wine with the manager in his Seven Sisters house, which will be a setting in Elizabeth's next novel. Bourbon and cigars with Dashiell Hammett afterward.
From notes for next theatrical production, based on current lodgings: Genre - musical comedy. Title - There's Something About a Bidet. Consider "Dancing Fountains" number in second act.
While researching her novel, a murder mystery set in San Francisco in the 1920s, Elizabeth guided us up Telegraph Hill to seek out the site of Edwin Booth's cottage. Why? because according to public records he complained about the gravel quarry that, before his death in 1893, was eating away the hill so deeply it threatened to landslide his house into the bay. The quarry was still there in the '20s, so Elizabeth decides there's a great place to ditch a body. Also while there, I noted that anyone high up Telegraph Hill in 1906 would have had an astounding view of the earthquake and subsequent fire devastating the city below. As a reminiscence from a character, that's now going into the novel.
With Elizabeth and Jacques Tati back at Cafe Zoetrope (owned by Francis Ford Coppola).
I'm putting Open the Pod Bay Doors, HAL into an intermission for a while. I'm pounding on some other, bigger writing projects, which makes trimming back assorted peripheral distractions ("Squirrel!") a necessity. I still respond to activity notifications, so feel welcome to browse and comment or contact me via my main site. And those blog rolls on the right are still my main avenues to bloggish favorites. So don't think of me as lost through the Stargate so much as just hiding on the other side of the monolith for a while. Thanks.
Today after we woke up, I brought Elizabeth her cup of coffee in bed as I do every morning. Lying there between sips, we shared the dreams we'd been having the moment the alarm clock went off.
For Elizabeth, we were having dinner with Johnny Depp in New Orleans.
As for me, we were dining in a restaurant/bar here in Seattle. Miranda July was sitting by herself at a table across the room. I approached her, said hello, and she invited us to join her. After some chat about each other's work, she invited me to join her on her next production, both as an actor and behind the scenes. (In the dream I told her that her recent film The Future didn't entirely work for me, but apparently this was no obstacle. She was pleasant throughout.)
What fed our respective dreams were two things, I think:
Seeing and utterly adoring Martin Scorsese's Hugo this weekend. (I'll post about that later.) During the closing credits we noticed that the movie was produced by Johnny Depp, and during the film Elizabeth noticed that the actor playing Django Reinhardt (Emil Lager) looked a lot like young Johnny Depp, which she thought was okay indeed.
Now I'm wondering what dreams we'll wake up to tomorrow. Maybe I can talk her into going out to dinner tonight (obviously dining well must be involved), followed by a showing of My Week with Marilyn....
Hollywood has a hard time shooting a movie worth a damn in Portland, Oregon*, my and Elizabeth's previous home town. However, some fine new TV is being set and shot there with enough frequency that we have friends who get in quality time as extras during shooting. "Portlandia" and "Leverage" are two of the more obvious examples.
Last night Elizabeth and I caught the pilot of NBC's new series "Grimm" (think "Buffy" meets "CSI"). We enjoyed it quite a lot, and it may just have real legs. One fun moment came when our heroes went into "Berkeley Park," identifying it by name and showing a glimpse of the actual Berkeley Park sign. "Hey, they're near our old house!" we exclaimed, the park being three blocks from our former address. Then our intrepid monster-finders entered the park and the scene cuts to deep, dark fairy-tale woods stretching for miles.
"My, the city has really let the place go," we observed of the erstwhile ball field.
It's a seasonal perennial at our house. In fact, it has been for me since I was a kid and the Peanuts holiday specials came to TV sponsored by Dolly Madison snack cakes. Now I have It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown and Merry Christmas, Charlie Brown on DVD, and the attendant snacks have changed significantly, but otherwise the annual ritual remains undiminished. Those two holidays just don't feel complete without them, with autumn (my favorite season) and Halloween invariably heralded by the warm oranges and reds contrasting with the cool nighttime azures and cobalts of Great Pumpkin. Two months later, December feels only half-done for this sentimental secularist if I don't make a point to watch Merry Christmas at least once, its sublime Vince Guaraldi score in constant rotation on my iPod's large Christmas playlist.
And certainly I'm not the same kid I was back in the Dolly Madison days. I'm older and more observant, which changes how I view the hallmarks of childhood. To this shifting perspective Great Pumpkin is not immune, and this year I noted how it has changed over the decades as I watch it with a gimlet eye. Or possibly it's the effects of the well-stirred gimlet that has replaced those Dolly Madison snack cakes. Something.
For instance, I have come to realize that poor Linus's obdurate plight taught me the follies of religious fundamentalism at an early age. The program is one of the great treatises on the subject. His arc tracks the classic cycle of fervent belief in a mysterious and unseen external agent, entreaties through prayer, proselytizing the dogma (Sally is a willing acolyte until the manifest disillusionment), reinforcement through sectarian hymns ("Have you come to sing pumpkin carols?"), a grand display of abstentious devotion to the mysterious and unseen external agent, the test of faith, the existential crisis, and finally a total pig-headed unwillingness to look facts in the face leading to obstinate, indignation-fueled doubling-down on those counterfactual beliefs, buttressed by a self-justifying misapprehension that the mysterious and unseen external agent will conform to the proselytized dogma next time. Linus, otherwise the most rational and philosophical of the Peanuts gang, captures the cankerous blight of the Southern Baptist zealotry I observed growing up in the small Southern town I've alluded to elsewhere.
Was it Charles M. Schulz that made me, a Bible Belt kid, an atheist? I'll thank him in the afterlife.
"Tonight the Great Pumpkin will rise out of the pumpkin patch. He flies through the air and brings toys to all the children of the world."
"I'm doomed. One little slip like that could cause the Great Pumpkin to pass you by. Oh, Great Pumpkin, where are you?"
"You kept me up all night waiting for the Great Pumpkin, and all that came was a beagle."
"I'll see the Great Pumpkin. I'll SEE the Great Pumpkin! Just you wait, Charlie Brown. The Great Pumpkin will appear and I'll be waiting for him."
Of course, I must admit that Sally doesn't acquit herself by her default resort to kneejerk victimhood, self-centered material consumerism, and the call for redress for imagined wrongs. "What a fool I was! I could have had candy apples and gum and cookies and money and all sorts of things, but no, I had to listen to you. You blockhead.... YOU OWE ME RESTITUTION!"
So much for Linus's demeaning outdated tenet that "little girls always believed everything that was told to them. I thought little girls were innocent and trusting." Good on you, Sally, but the choice was always yours, kiddo.
And then there's how every-freakin'-body treats Charlie Brown — even the presumed adults who answer the trick-or-treat doorbell. "I got a rock" indeed. THREE TIMES. What a cruddy 'hood, coldly taunting the round-headed kid like that. No wonder the parents never show their faces.
Even his ostensible friends call him "Charlie Brown," his full name, even in casual conversation with all the supercilious formality of a call to the principal's office. In the Peanuts canon, Peppermint Patty calls him "Chuck" most of the time, while her friend Marcie usually uses "Charles"; in 1979 they admitted to each other that each probably has a crush on him, explaining the familiarity. Years later that's an eventual three-way that will likely, alas, end in tears.
Speaking of the adults, not even Linus's parents notice that their boy is shivering from exposure in the pumpkin patch at 4 AM. Where are they at that hour, huh? It's as if off-screen there's this endless absentee-adults-only debauched revelry followed by prolonged blackouts across town. Might as well re-purpose the scene to portray Linus in the grip of malaria in a special called It's a Jungle Out There, Charlie Brown. Meanwhile his parents are off with Bob, Carol, Ted, and Alice (or George, Martha, Nick, and Honey) swilling highballs and placing their carkeys in the orange ceramic Coupe "key party" bowl on someone's coffee table.
At least Snoopy's fantasies are immersive and full-sensory hallucinations, and possibly harmless. Although the fact that they are entirely enactments of personal hostility, warfare, machine-gunfire, desperate battles that always end in defeat, escape and displacement behind "enemy lines" — well, that leaves me wondering when he'll finally snap and turn on his owner. And who's that? Why, Charlie Brown, of course, the picked-on, laughed-at kid with the bag of rocks. That won't end well either.
And then there's Lucy — face it, the girl's got disturbing sociopathic issues and a tendency toward capricious violence coupled with the mind of a criminal genius. "Peculiar thing about this contract — it was never notarized." But in the end she shows that she loves her brother when she brings Linus in from the pre-dawn cold of the pumpkin patch. (She set her alarm clock for 4 AM, evidently predicting that their parents wouldn't be returning all night; how long has this neglect been going on that she at her age is the de facto stand-in parent?) Still, that ongoing scheme with the football (notice her glee at her recurrent success in playing everyman Charlie Brown for a sucker), not to mention her quest for recognition and power (in two months she'll insist on being the "Christmas Queen") — she's on her way to becoming Michael Corleone's consigliere by the time she's 35, after causing her therapist to give up the profession.
Yes, the great Charles M. Schulz taught an entire generation that the world is angry, petty, unfair, unsupervised, invidiously judgmental, and (if Pigpen is any indicator) unhygienic and possibly disease-ridden.
And for that I thank him every year.
Of course, like all enduring religions, even the Great Pumpkin has its own Apocrypha:
Music: Esperanza Spalding
Near at hand: Boxer Beetle by Ned Beauman
... for a week-and-change of jaunting and gallivanting with Elizabeth and a friend, taking in some theater, and getting a spot of work done on a writing project (or two). A change of socks, my iPad — there, packing's all done. If any of my London readers care for a meet-up, feel welcome to email me via the address on the image you see here.
Today's my birthday. Remarkably, it happens the same day every year. And that's not just me being flip, because if events had played out according to expert opinion at the time, the mere fact of my having another birthday after July 10, 2009 would peg the Remarkable-o-Meter into the red zone. Today, as Elizabeth reminded me here at our weekend cabin getaway half-way up Mt. Rainier, is my second "rebirthday."
As I mentioned in my post from this day last year — "Yeah, I know, and such small portions" — and the March 2010 post that initiated this blog in the first place, on my birthday two years ago I survived an incident that feels like a Very Special Episode of House or else a discarded scene from the Final Destination series. And yet here I am, having not merely endured but prevailed. (Hat tip to William Faulkner.)
Given that this is a Mostly Movies blog, and in lieu of another original post on the incident (after all, Rainier awaits, to say nothing of Elizabeth and the dog), here are a few relevant movie quotes to commemorate the occasion of yours truly still being here to press Publish and go climb a mountain:
"Sometimes a little near death experience helps them put things into perspective." — Something To Talk About
"It's alive! ALIVE" — Frankenstein
"'Ere, he says he's not dead." — Monty Python and the Holy Grail
"Has it ever occurred to you that how we deal with death is at least as important as how we deal with life?" — Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan
"Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more. It's contrast." — The Hours
"Funny how gentle people get with you once you're dead." — Sunset Blvd.
[In response to Death coming for Jonas Skat]: "Is there no exemption for actors?" — The Seventh Seal
"Honey, we all got to go sometime, reason or no reason. Dying's as natural as living. The man who's too afraid to die is too afraid to live." — The Misfits
"If a man doesn't know death, he doesn't know life." — Grand Hotel
"No man can walk out of his own story." — Rango
"I don't like things that finish. One must begin something else right away." — Last Tango in Paris
"Bad things happen, but you can still live." — Super 8
"Get busy living or get busy dying." — The Shawshank Redemption
"Do I know what I'm doing today? No. But I'm here, and I'm going to give it my best shot." — Zoolander
"And then ol' Danny fell, round and round like a penny whirly-gig. 20,000 miles. It took him half an hour to fall before he struck the rocks. And you know what they did to Peachy? They crucified him, sir, between two pine trees, as Peachy's hands will show. Ol' poor Peachy, who never done them any harm, just hung there and he screamed, but he didn't die. And the next day they cut him down and they said it was a miracle he wasn't dead and they let him go, and Peachy come home in about a year." — The Man Who Would Be King
"Your life's 'To Do List' must be a baffling document." — Get Him to the Greek
"There are times when suddenly you realize you are nearer the end than the beginning. And you wonder, you ask yourself, what the sum total of your life represents. What difference your being there at any time made to anything. Or if you've made any difference at all, really, particularly in comparison with other men's careers. I don't know if that kind of thinking is very healthy; but I must admit I've had some thoughts on those lines from time to time." — The Bridge on the River Kwai
"If the sky were to suddenly open up, there would be no law, there would be no rule. There would be only you and your memories, the choices you've made and the people you've touched." — Donnie Darko
"I don't think any word can explain a man's life. No, I guess Rosebud is just a piece in a jigsaw puzzle." — Citizen Kane
"Just steer the ship, Captain. Don't speculate." — Around the World in Eighty Days
"Live every day as if it is your last, for one day you're sure to be right." — Breaker Morant
"There's nothing sadder than getting to the end of your life and saying, 'I didn't do it right'." — All of Me
Grim Reaper: "A hit. You have sank my battleship!"
Bill, Ted: "Excellent! Yeah!"
Ted: "I totally knew he put it in the J's, dude!"
Bill: "Good thinking, Ted."
Grim Reaper: "You must play me again."
Bill: "WHAT?"
Grim Reaper: "Um, best two out of three."
Ted: "No way!"
Grim Reaper: "Yes way."
— Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey
"I was dead too long this time. The anesthetic almost destroyed the regenerative process." — The Doctor (Paul McGann), Doctor Who TV movie
"In that moment, I knew the answer to the riddle of the infinite. That existence begins and ends is man's conception, not nature's. And I felt my body dwindling, melting, becoming nothing. My fears melted away, and in their place came acceptance. All this vast majesty of creation, it had to mean something. And then I meant something too. Yes, smaller than the smallest, I meant something too. To God, there is no zero. I still exist." — The Incredible Shrinking Man
"Life's like a movie. Write your own ending." — The Muppet Movie
::Squiggly swirly light thingy:: — The Tree of Life
And since I began last year's post with a Woody Allen quote, how about I end this one with another:
For me and Elizabeth, this weekend marks either our 16th anniversary or the 16th reel of our ongoing honeymoon rom-com. So yesterday we dashed out of Seattle like impetuous romantics* and headed north to the San Juans.
Now we're on Orcas Island overlooking Massacre Bay within view of Skull Island! I'm in my own private pirate movie!
(On a side note, I can also testify that deer are to Orcas Island what squirrels are to everywhere else.)
* Tom Hanks will play me in the film adaptation, dammit, although those who keep saying I remind them of Paul Giamitti can make their case with his agent.
As I've mentioned elsewhere in this "mostly movies" blog, astronomy is also a significant passion of mine. Some of my most satisfying — professionally, creatively, academically, even spiritually — career work has happened under the astronomy dome.
So I get a tingly thrill when those two areas converge in the great big Venn diagram of my life.*
So here's a public tingly thrill for Roger Ebert. While I've been enlightened and entertained for years by his film reviews and commentary, over the past few years he's become someone whose expanded writings on diverse topics in various media I greet with an appreciative, admiring fist-bump, sometimes a vocal "Oh hell yeah!" He occasionally waxes into matters cosmic, and his latest journal entry almost sounds like one of my planetarium shows.
"On this dot of space and in this instant of time, the human mind is a great success story, and I am fortunate to possess one. No, even that's not true, because a goldfish isn't unfortunate to lack one. It's just that knowing what I know, I would rather be a human than a goldfish."
When I read his post, I can hear it in Carl Sagan's voice, which takes me back to one of the reasons why I got into the field in the first place, back when. (Isaac Asimov played a part too when I was in fifth grade, in a serendipitous karmic "circle of life" payoff years later. I may tell that story here sometime.)
While the past several years have been a (generally, generously speaking, squinting through one eye) not too objectionable time to be a movie buff, we live in an awesome** time to be into astronomy, whether as a pro or an amateur enthusiast. I sure would love to see those two fan-thusiasms of mine converge more often, especially on the screen.
So consider this post a public fist-bump, with an "Oh hell yeah!" thrown in too. An excuse to swoon dreamily at Jodie Foster at the Very Large Array ain't too bad either.
* Oh, it's a rare convergence. I'd make a first-rate astro consultant for the movies. But do they call me? Noooooo. I wrote and directed the one and only Star Trek astronomy show, so if you know J.J. Abrams please send him my way before his Star Trek sequel starts shooting. The supernova that "threatened to destroy the galaxy" chaps my ass every time. So does that whole "Delta Vega" thing. And....
So far, at least, it appears that my January "mostly movies" blogging amounts to only three posts, and just one of those is what you might classify as being "of substance." There's no big reason for the fall-back, though I can jot down three middlin' ones with zero effort:
I've been concentrating on other writing projects, most of them reasonably enjoyable and some, I hope, shall prove lucrative. Always a plus, that, in these parlous economic times. I used to get paid for doing this, but these days it's simply a languid pleasure boat down a lazy river rather than a "Thar be deadlines off the port bow!" whaling expedition. I have a handful of posts in various stages of leaky seaworthiness, but don't call me Ishmael.
You know when you have a cold? I mean the kind that saps your energy and enthusiasm and the reserved headspace you keep behind the sinus passages. Yeah, that's been me all month, a true rarity. Haven't had a cold hang on like this for years. Ugh. Today's my first day back in Seattle after an unusually long time away (see #3 below), and the cold (or whatever it's mutating into) has really yanked the welcome mat out from under me. My fever now is 102.1° F. As soon as I hit Publish, I'm getting horizontal, maybe with the remote in my hand. Maybe.
Been traveling quite a bit, which is great as I love traveling, but doing so puts me in the way of happy distractions that preclude blogging. And it has put me on more than my usual allotment of planes and airports and restaurants and other crowded spaces. I suspect this has a lot to do with #2 above.
So, in lieu of a full-on post, here's a photo of yours truly that Elizabeth took yesterday afternoon at San Francisco's Cafe Zoetrope, accompanied by Alfred Hitchcock and surrounded by the spirit(s) of Francis Ford Coppola. I recommend the place with gusto. (Yes, yes, I took the cannoli. It's expected, isn't it?)
Music: Moby, "Run On" Near at hand: Kleenex, thermometer (oral, btw)
"In a way his pictures are like a transcendent juggling act in which it seems that the whole universe is in exquisite flying motion and the one point of repose is the juggler's effortless, uninterested face." — James Agee, "Comedy's Greatest Era"
Everything I need to know about life I learned from Buster Keaton.
Okay, that's not completely true, but I like the sound of it. And it's a Starbucks-cup bromide that has rolled around my brain more than once recently.
As 2010 projects its final frames and we smash-cut to 2011, I'm getting all reflective and thoughtful, looking back at the past twelve months, taking stock of the significant narrative arcs of the year.
What brings me to Keaton is a renewed appreciation of how we face adversity, those bumps and turns and unforeseen punji traps that make good plot points in movies but are hell to live through in real life.
You see, too many of my friends are going through too much of that hell lately. Relationships fracturing, critical health issues, the economy sinking them down like cement overshoes in a cheap gangster flick — life's slings and arrows, sound and fury, the whole unasked-for shitstorm, with no discernible fairness or reason or purpose in sight.
Indeed, 2010 saw my own full recovery from a medical cataclysm worthy of an episode of House, a long episode I've only alluded to slantwise in this blog. So, yeah, not only do I understand that Wile-E.-Coyote-falling-off-the-cliff feeling, I have fostered a new appreciation of the coping mechanisms we devise for ourselves to help soften the dusty whump! of impact.
Among my coping mechanisms, one I've recently recommended to others: favorite movies, comedies particularly. You know, "...best medicine," all that jazz.
Take The General, for instance. I've owned more video editions of this film than any other title, culminating this year with Kino's outstanding Blu-ray disc. In ten years, when it's available via a downloadable app to my Cerebrum Communicator, I'll no doubt get that one too.
Like Chaplin's The Gold Rush, Keaton's practically perfect 1927 Civil War masterpiece is a comedy of epic scale and ambition, and pinnacles lists of the top films of the silent era. Moreover — this point is often overlooked — it departs from Keaton's earlier shorts by delivering not a gag-a-minute string of slapstick setpieces, but instead an action-adventure-historical-war-espionage thriller deftly spiced with comic bits.
Set at the outbreak of the Civil War (or, as parts of the South still call it, the Unresolved Argument We'll Keep Bringing Up), one of the film's famous sequences involves a chase between two steam locomotives. One of them is the General, the engine beloved by its engineer, would-be Confederate soldier Johnnie Gray (Keaton). Union Army spies have commandeered the General to use it as a moving sabotage platform against Confederate forces.
Worse, they've kidnapped Johnnie's second great love, the girl Annabelle Lee. Earlier she rebuffed him after a misunderstanding branded him a coward unwilling to join the Confederate Army like all honorable Southern men. Now Johnnie is giving chase in another locomotive, the Texas, determined to defeat the saboteurs, take back his engine, and (possibly in this order) rescue the girl whose tintype he displays in the General's cab.
In hot pursuit, Johnnie clambers over the General's fuel tender onto the flatcar holding a cannon he acquired en route. He measures a handful of gunpowder in pinches, then tamps it down, loads the cannonball, lights the fuse, and returns to the engine's control cab. The cannon fires, yet the cannonball arcs (rather delicately) to his feet in the cab. Giving it that famous deadpan Keaton look, he rolls the cannonball off the speeding train shortly before it explodes.
He tries again. This time cool-headed desperation prompts him to forgo handfuls and pinches to shove the entire powder keg down the barrel. He loads another cannonball, lights the fuse. His retreat to the cab is interrupted when the flatcar's hitch snags his foot. Shaking the foot free, Johnnie also shakes the cannon barrel down to aim not overhead toward the Union saboteurs ahead of him, but straight at himself and the engine.
He retreats to safety by climbing the exterior of the engine to the cowcatcher up front — train track blurring mere inches beneath him, Union soldiers not far ahead, and mammoth artillery primed and pointed at the tonnage of locomotive against his back.
At the critical instant, the track curves just so, the cannon fires, and the blasting cannonball arcs not into the Texas but into the rear boxcar of the stolen General. The explosion leads the frightened Yankee raiders to believe that an outnumbering Confederate militia is hot on their tail.
In response, they block the track first with the damaged boxcar (Johnnie cleverly switches the rails to avoid a collision) and then by dropping large wooden railroad ties onto the track. Johnnie slows the Texas and runs ahead to lift the first log off the track. When the Texas's cowcatcher catches him like a spatula, he straddles it with the heavy railroad tie still in his arms.
But a second tie blocks the track ahead! Well — here's the beauty part — when the Texas approaches it he lifts the first tie and, with Olympian style and precision, heaves it onto the end of the second tie, catapulting it smoothly up and out of his trajectory with neither log clobbering him in the head. The chase can continue.
In that scene lies a metaphor, I'm sure of it.
It's classic Keaton, displaying the qualities that make the crisply expressive "stone-faced" Keaton character forever memorable: his steady resolve in the face of obstacles, his willingness to accept surprises and sudden changes of plan with dry aplomb, pausing only to perhaps slightly arch his eyebrows or momentarily stare the conundrum full in the face. It's as if tattooed on Keaton's chest is a motto taken from Kipling's Barrack Room Ballads: "When first under fire an' you're wishful to duck ... Be thankful you're livin', and trust to your luck / And march to your front like a soldier."
On the great railroad track of life, if only we could address our obstacles with such stoic resourcefulness focused on what we need to do rather than on the mugging-for-the-camera, hammed-up Oh, shit! of it all.
Adding to this chicken soup for the movie-lover's soul, remember that we're watching Joseph Frank Keaton, actor and director, performing dangerous and outrageous stunts with no camera trickery or stunt double because that's what it took to do the job. We can wish for a New Year's blip in the zeitgeist that manifests as people all across society — from the most brutally slinged-and-arrowed among us to simply humble writers who love movies — finding their bliss and reducing their blood pressure with one four-letter mantra: WWBD. What Would Buster Do?
Or how about Steamboat Bill, Jr.? This Mark Twain-like tale from 1928 is Keaton's last great feature. In it, Buster is a ukulele-strumming Harvard milquetoast who returns to Mississippi to find his father, a tough and crusty sidewheeler steamboat captain.
In the film's famous climax, a cyclone blows the local port town to smithereens. In terms of sheer physical damage, it's an amazing scene. It supersizes stunts and gags Keaton successfully rehearsed in earlier shorts such as "Back Stage" (made during his fruitful years with Fatty Arbuckle) and "One Week". It's the sort of destruction that nowadays would be consigned to CGI. Buildings peel apart and tumble down to splinters at Junior's feet. Houses lift off their foundations. Junior rides a wheeled hospital bed and flies through the air clinging to a tree uprooted and set flying as if to Oz. A dozen impressive large-scale visual feats come, bam-bam-bam, in this scene alone. And through it all his expression, as ever, registers only controlled alarm and a certain thoughtful interest in the forces buffeting him hither and thither.
Again St. Buster teaches us that, in a world of windswept and sometimes violent unpredictability, we can either teeter face-first into the gale and risk sliding through the mud on our ass, or allow life's vicissitudes to carry us where we must go to (in Junior's case) save the day, embrace reconciliation with our loved ones, and get the girl.
"What Keaton did physically is actually quite startling when you discover that he did all of his own stunts," said Kevin Spacey in a 1999 American Film Institute special. In the cyclone scene, the stunt everybody remembers is the house. When the two-story, two-ton facade of a house descends to squash Keaton below, it smacks the ground and shatters, with Keaton saved by standing in the precise space of its small open window. Spacey again: "The famous one is when the house falls. He had to stand on a mark. I'm told it was a nail ... if he moved an inch to one side he would have been crushed to death."
In other words, when the walls are falling down, WWBD tells us: try to stand where the window is.
Never mind that The General is based on a true story and shows off Keaton's fanatical devotion to historical authenticity. He filmed it in Oregon for the scenery and because only there could he find the narrow-gauge track required for the genuine period locomotives he acquired. The beautiful Mathew Brady-inspired photography includes luscious moving long shots of vast forested mountainscapes, steaming locomotives (the coolest comedy props ever used), and warring Northern and Southern armies played by hundreds of Oregon National Guardsmen.
Never mind that its most famous moment, in which a real, full-sized train plummets off a burning high-span trestle bridge, is the most expensive shot from the silent era — $42,000, and some years ago I read that that equates into the millions today. Walter Kerr, in his indispensable The Silent Clowns, called it "surely the most stunning visual event ever arranged for a film comedy." It goes without saying that there were no second takes.
Never mind the comedic, dramatic, technical, and filmcraft sophistication on view throughout Keaton's silent-era, independent work.
No, the fulcrum point of both The General and Steamboat Bill, Jr. is Keaton's signature image — a man alone, making the most of whatever the hell's going on around him.
Watching Keaton today, we realize that he's the most modern of all silent screen masters. His ongoing travails at the whims of The Machine — meaning his beloved mechanical contrivances as well as Nature or "the Establishment" — make him our contemporary. By virtue of their subtlety and number, his confrontational pas de deux with modernity outgrace even Chaplin's marvelous Man-vs.-Machine allegories in Modern Times.
Also, today Chaplin often strikes us as oversentimental, maudlin even. That's not to downplay his genius or his comedy at all, though there's something about Keaton's restrained, underplayed determination as he faces each new obstacle that feels refreshingly timely. The Little Tramp was Chaplin's "Everyman," self-consciously created to embody all people from all times. The character's longevity is a testimony to that universality. But it's Keaton's innocent yet unflappable achiever we more identify with. As Keaton himself put it, "Charlie's tramp was a bum with a bum's philosophy. Lovable as he was, he would steal if he got the chance. My little fellow was a workingman, and honest." We feel for the Tramp, but we want to be like Keaton.
It's telling that the two most inventive actor-writer-directors Hollywood has ever produced, Keaton and Chaplin, in their heyday worked side by side but never together. One difference between these equal-yet-separate geniuses is that Chaplin was a stubbornly 19th-century Victorian making movies in, but unable to fully acclimate to, a whole new 20th century. Keaton, on the other hand, was a Machine Age modernist who grasped the world of Model T's and hand-cranked movie cameras as his toybox.
It's my suspicion that Chaplin, if delivered to New Year's Day 2011 via time machine, would be entirely at sea, and disgruntled to boot, within today's moviemaking world. Keaton, on the other hand, would leap into it with every downloadable app at his fingertips, meanwhile putting Steven Spielberg and James Cameron on hold until he chooses to take a video conference.
Keaton and Chaplin are both enjoying a boom of popular rediscovery in recent years. I can't help but suspect that — while both awe us and make us laugh — Chaplin speaks to our sense of nostalgia the way Dickens does, and Keaton connects with us as a fellow modernite. Who among us can't identify with his small, straight-backed figure standing atop his speeding engine, leaning forward as if his shoes are nailed to the roof, shading his eyes and gazing into the onrushing distance, wondering what the hell's coming next?
